Six Videos for Seven Opening Systems: An International Master's Promise and the Data Gap

At eleven at night, the playing hall of a chess club tucked down a narrow lane in Hongkou held only four boards. At the third board, a man in his forties, rated 2026, pushed his bishop to f4 for the third time in a single evening. Three games, three times the same second move. He did not look at the board when he played it — his eyes drifted to the window, as though the move had been signed in advance and merely needed signing again. His opponent, a university student playing Black, sat with folded arms, tapping his index finger on the tabletop in a steady rhythm. He did not know what to do. The third game ended after forty-one moves, and he still did not understand where he had lost.

I sat at the last board, recording the game in pencil. The scene was not unusual. Over the past decade I have watched an entire generation of club players take the long way round: after 1.d4 d5, they do not play 2.c4. They refuse to enter the theoretical labyrinth of the Slav, the Semi-Slav, the Queen's Gambit Accepted and the Orthodox Queen's Gambit — systems that can swallow a club player's entire year and still leave the first half unfinished. Instead they develop a bishop to f4, a knight to f3, a pawn to e3, and castle short. Tidy, airtight, and it shifts the entire burden of thinking to the other side of the board.

That is the terrain a new instructional product is aiming at, and it is why I want to spend a few pages on it.

The product

IM Valeri Lilov, a Bulgarian trainer, has released the twenty-first episode of a video series titled "Power of Initiative". The product consists of six instructional videos, presented as offering practical plans for Black against the opening systems White uses to dodge heavy theory: the Colle System, the Trompowsky Attack, the Torre Attack, the London System, the Catalan, the Blackmar-Diemer Gambit and the Richter-Veresov Opening. The product title mentions the Benko Gambit.

Six videos for seven systems — that ratio deserves a pause. Divided evenly, each system receives less than one video. For anyone who has sat down to build a curriculum, that number forces a second look. A system like the Catalan or the Richter-Veresov, if you want to cover its pawn structures properly, its typical middlegame plans, its critical move orders, needs more than that. One video can sketch the guiding idea, but it can hardly equip a student to walk into a game with real calculation.

The name is a separate issue. The Benko Gambit arises after 1.d4 Nf6, an entirely different branch from the systems listed in the content outline. Putting the Benko Gambit in the title is most likely a search-optimisation decision aimed at players currently looking up that popular system. There is nothing commercially wrong with the approach, but it opens a gap between buyer expectation and the material actually delivered.

What actually creates the danger

Based on my experience following the games and training sessions of club players over many years, I believe the real value of this product lies somewhere other than where the promotional copy points.

The introduction describes White's systems as "extremely dangerous". That is marketing language. The London System is a sound setup, but it does not belong to the group of openings that make opponents flinch at the highest level; it is modest in ambition. The Colle System is sometimes described as passive. The Torre Attack tends to lead to strategic positions where both sides grind in silence. The actual level of danger depends almost entirely on the quality of Black's preparation, not on the nature of the system.

In other words, the threat does not live in White's move. It lives in Black's impatience.

I have sat on the Black side of hundreds of games against London System players. What beat them was never the system. What beat them was a c-pawn push played too early, a central trade taken at the wrong moment, an appetite for opening the position when the position did not permit it. When White chooses these systems, White has already limited his own ambition. That is information. That is free data Black receives as early as move two.

So when a course promises "a practical plan for each opening", the right question should be: is that plan built on an understanding of pawn structures, or is it merely a sequence of moves to memorise?

As for the instructor, the promotional material confirms that Valeri Lilov is a Bulgarian trainer, but it states no rating, no student results, no competitive record. For an instructional product, that is a sizeable gap. In the chess content market, International Masters producing practical repertoire courses is a common and sensible model — the target audience is usually club players between 1400 and 2026, where a teacher with a stable rating already delivers value. But buyers still need to verify independently, because the pitch supplies no data at all.

Behind the poster

There is a paradox in how this market works. The more courses on defending against the London System get released, the wider the gap grows between those who prepare and those who do not. But the paradox is this: most International Master-level material on these systems is already available free on online platforms. The differentiator of a paid product lies in its structure, in guiding a student along a path, and rarely in new technical discovery.

More telling still is the packaging of fear. Players are told their opponents are using extremely dangerous systems, that they must prepare at once. Fear of being left behind is an effective sales engine, but it does not substitute for a technical assessment. A clear-headed player should separate the two.

And there is one more thing I want to say plainly. My most romantic mistake was believing the pieces can write poetry. I have believed it through twenty-two years in the commentary booth, and I still do. But that belief does not exempt me from checking the data. If a course offers no preview, publishes no information about the instructor and cites no sources for its claims, caution is the correct response.

Something else keeps nagging at me. When the seventeen-year-old prodigy did not yet know he was about to become a legend, he never bought a course. He just stayed behind after training, playing one position over and over until he understood it in his flesh. Today's content market can sell you seven systems in six videos, but nobody can sell you the hours you have to spend alone with the board.

Back to the board

I returned to the club in Hongkou the following evening. The student playing Black was still there. This time he did not tap his fingers on the table. He played slowly, kept the structure intact, and waited. On move twenty-three, the player with White pushed the c-pawn in a position that did not permit it. The student traded, opened the file, and won.

He did not buy any course. He simply stopped searching for a miraculous move.

An empty stadium still keeps the applause of the departed, and so does an empty playing hall. What remains after every game is not the opening system someone sold you, but the quality of the patience you bring to each move.